alt Hacker NewsI'm a Kagi search/assistant user and advocate but the "small web" product is a frustrating misnomer.
To me the small web is any little website that was created to be interesting rather than to sell me something. That includes stuff like neocities, "shrine" type sites, single purpose sites, fandom portals, web experiments, etc.
Unfortunately Kagi's definition of "small web" is: blog or webcomic. You must have an RSS feed and it must have recent posts. That rules out so much interesting stuff I don't understand the point.
Replies
I am looking for something that would filter for sites that rarely post but have good content. The number one problem with most of these systems is that everything favours frequent posting. Even if I do it manually, I cannot keep the tabs over many rarely posting sites - this is an obvious example of a problem that we delegate to computers. Favouring frequent posters creates incentives to do that even if quality worsens.
Not only that, I just clicked "Next Post" more than a hundred times, and over 90% of posts I got were about LLMs and coding agents.
You'd probably like the small web search on Marginalia then: https://marginalia-search.com/
I could definitely see value in filters for "has RSS" and "has recent posts"—maybe even as the default view—but I absolutely agree that this is much less interesting to me without the wider world of interesting, small sites.
yeah i agree. the crux of it is no corporations / no ads / no astroturfing.
Well, it's much harder for them to add content from websites that don't have a feed.
This is just a blog ring.
I would also love to go back to Geocities style web interaction, but the medium is the message, and the way the Internet has evolved as a medium means that people don't naturally interact with it in a way that supports regression to that era. Attempts to force it like neocities have a hyperreal quality to them.
Same feeling here
Heavy Kagi user and the idea behind small web was appealing; but how its implemented don't click with me
Their rules excludes an absolute gem like https://www.sheldonbrown.com/ which is, to me, the essence of what we could call the "small web".
Each times the topic pops up, I try a few random ones and never found anything interesting.